Category Archives: sketch

While drawing Flinflins covers is a always a real pleasure, coloring them still remains a pain.
The reason is simple: while you can always correct a drawing before inking, there’s no way you can rectify a bad color. Watercolor inks will not tolerate any remorse: you can’t add an extra layer, if you made a mistake or even simply a minor blot.
Thus, until the last minute of the coloring phase you can totally ruin your sketch.
Besides this, Hergé style in terms of color, whether it is effective is not the most pleasant to execute : no shadow, just solid color, so characteristic of his ” Ligne Claire style.
This is probably why I have so many drawings waiting in my drawing cardboard. I always find a good excuse to escape the final phase of coloring and complete the drawing.
This morning, deciding enough is enough, I attacked the coloring a old drawing of getaway of the Flinflins tribe to Chausey Islands and Mont Saint Michel, a delicate operation because I had in mind to restore a nightlife. As a precaution, I went through some quick trials, coloring on a photocopy before attacking the final illustration.
To be continued …

Anyone who stays in Istanbul, falls immediately in love with the Bosphorus flowing between the European and the Asian districts of the city. Small “vapurs” cross the strait from one bank to another, regularly announcing their departure in a charming old-fashioned concert of foghorns.
At sunset the place to be is the Golden Horn where all you need is to sit on a terrace and sip raki watching the ballet of boats.
This is where the Flinflins family was enjoying the delights of a family event, yet another opportunity to enrich the saga with a new episode: Gold in Bosphorus!
This time there was a little extra challenge: how to cram everyone into a single image with an easy-to-recognize face in this Hergé’s style so difficult to mimic.
I’m not sure the final result is a satisfactory one ! And unfortunately there was no space left to accommodate some mythical characters – beyond Snowy of course – of Tintin’s adventures. We’ll do better next time!
(To be continued …)

Elaborating the first sketches of a new Flinflin cover is always a very creative process where you try to fix on the paper the fugitive and fuzzy image you have in mind (see previous post). This is usually a short, intense and febrile process to produce hasty sketches until you feel you have achieved the proper composition.

Once satisfied with the result, then comes a longer work to get to the final pencil drawing. It’s a painstaking job where you try to find the right attitude of each character, positioning them correctly into the scene, detailing elements of the landscape (but not too much to keep a ‘Ligne Claire’ style) and sometimes even reworking the entire layout.
This is the fun part of the job where you are basically trying to imagine what Hergé would have done.
In this specific case, it was all the more difficult that Hergé has carefully avoided any reference to World War II in his work, choosing instead to send Tintin, Haddock and Milou far away on the oceans (in successively ‘The Shooting Star’, ‘The Secret of the Unicorn’ and ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’) to avoid any complications at a time when Belgium was occupied by German forces.

Flinflin loves this phase of the work because it requires flipping through Tintin albums in search of references to help develop the final design with an easily understandable story: Installing Alan in full motion in the foreground, inserting a bomb explosion found in Coke and Stock, adding Pr Calculus and his pendulum apparently unaware of surrounding agitation, …

Even when the drawing is clear in mind, this step can take many hours of drawing. Sometimes it can almost become a painful process where the design is honed for several days until you get the exact final composition.
Sometimes, it can almost become a painful process where you may have to tweak the drawing for days until you get the right final composition.
Occasionally, you may even have to completely redesign the whole cover or worse, drop it until you get a better idea.
But this is another story…